On reading the introduction to Carl Rhodes’s Disturbing Business Ethics: Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Organization, my first thought was that this is a brave and ambitious endeavor. Reading Levinas, for me at least, is always a hugely rewarding but demanding exercise in phenomenology. It is rewarding because of the optimism or confidence that comes with Levinas’s uncovering of our innate capacities for an ethical response to the other, my vulnerability to another’s vulnerability, but demanding because this response is beyond or prior to language and representation and is not to be confused with the mere assertion of good intentions. Ethics, following Levinas, is an unavoidable and unchosen felt responsibility to the other that arises as a consequence of human sentience; it is a responsibility to my neighbor that goes one way and is without promise of reciprocity, recognition, or effectiveness. As Rhodes puts this in the opening paragraph, “for Levinas, ethics arises out of the disturbance of selfishness and egoism—a disturbance that would put the other person ahead of me such that I might be commanded by the other’s ethical demand” (1).
To this challenging view of ethics is then added the difficult transition, which Levinas’s work illuminates, from the experience of felt responsibility to a specific other, to the “impossible” and invariably political demand for “justice” in relation to the other others to whom I also have a responsibility. This takes us firmly into the space of business ethics and any attempt to prescribe norms to which all are subject; such attempts can be animated by the ethical response but must necessarily be imperfect in their form and exercise. As Rhodes puts this, “ethics can inform a call to justice and the exercise of power so as to disturb not just personal subjectivity but also organizational order, especially when that order is proclaimed as being ‘ethical’” (8). However, the third element that Rhodes sets out to explore is the absolute opposition of Levinas’s ethics to the current dominance of neoliberalism and its celebration of the pursuit of self-interest. What makes this book both ambitious and important is this counterposing of Levinas’s ethics to “a morality of the market that not only conceives of practices associated with rivalry, economic rationality and self-interest as features of economic markets but extends these as virtues for everyday life” (10).
The disturbance to which the title refers, then, is threefold—an inescapable disturbance to the ego in the experience of the “assignation” of responsibility for my neighbor; a disturbance of the complacency or righteousness that might be claimed in relation to any formal statement of business ethics; and finally, a disturbance of the neoliberal ideology that currently gives moral license to the pursuit only of the interests of the self. Rhodes summarizes:
Such is the disruptive power of ethics: its origin in the disturbance of the egoistic self and its practice in the ethico-political disturbance of politics itself. This is a disturbing ethics that can too be brought to bear on how people in organizations treat each other, how people resist the exercise of organizational power, how people construe a collective organizational ethics or even how we write about organizations. These politics share the ability to question and disturb the self-satisfaction and complacency of a self, tempted to forget or ignore needs and interests other than its own, and in so doing forego ethics itself (16).
This conception of ethics as disturbance is then explored and elaborated in the remaining chapters of the book. The second chapter offers a broad mapping of the space within which this disturbance of business ethics must take place. It begins with a fuller exposition of Levinas’s view of the “impossible” tension between ethics and justice; of why the anarchic experience of responsibility for a particular other can inspire but cannot itself translate into a programmatic recipe for business ethics. Instead, Rhodes argues, the fundamental nature of ethics in organizations lies not in the embrace of normative prescriptions for conduct, but rather in the experience of ethical dilemmas created by the “indissoluble tensions between the needs of the other and those of all of the other others” (27). Perhaps most radically, addressing these ethical problems is argued to depend on our being able to maintain “the space between sovereign organization and anarchic ethics” (31). This, in turn, suggests that business ethics cannot be left to managers but instead ultimately depends on the institutions of civil society within which ethical anarchism is nurtured. As Rhodes puts it, “this is a business ethics of the street, not the board room—a business ethics of the citizen and not the executive—a business ethics that has not yet sacrificed democracy to neoliberalism” (36).
Within this broad context, the following three chapters then focus on different dimensions of how such a view of ethics as disturbance might require us to reconceive of business ethics. Chapter 3 unfolds around a distinction between justice seen as a condition of effective leadership and leadership seen as the pursuit of justice. The importance of distributive, procedural, or interactive justice to perceptions of just leadership is now a mainstay of management thinking but, Rhodes argues, is built on an “unexamined neoliberal managerialism. . . that while using the lexicon of ethics and justice actually considers justice largely from an instrumental perspective” (42). Levinas’s responsibility for the other, Rhodes suggests, is “prior to” both formal and value rationality such that there is no easy consonance between fairness and the realization of corporate success. Instead, the reality of a concern for justice leaves leaders with the “indefatigable challenges” of facing “multiple and conflicting demands from other people, all of which can be conceived of as important and for which no rational calculation can determine the right thing to do” (56).
Chapter 4 pursues the themes of justice and politics through an examination of debates about workplace diversity, notably in relation to LGBT activism. Current debates are polarized around instrumental business-case arguments for diversity versus ethical demands for the recognition of otherness. Here Rhodes offers his own notion of “ethical praxis” to explore the potential for diversity activism that is “practiced as an ethically informed yet pragmatic politics” (70). Rather than depend on purely ethical arguments to resist the dehumanizing refusal of alterity, ethical praxis suggests the potential for diversity activists to use the business-case logic “strategically” for the “purposes of its own ethically inspired project” (79). Rhodes, however, is also alert to the danger that this foundational ethical inspiration may itself be forgotten and diversity promoted as just another means to corporate success.
The fifth chapter has as its empirical focus the German car maker Volkswagen. For VW, business ethics in the form of its claims to be meeting low emissions standards in the United States was central to its strategy of global market dominance. However, in September 2015, such claims were revealed to be entirely fictitious and dependent on a “defeat device” that masked actual emissions under test conditions. The case is used to return to a view of business ethics as ultimately dependent on civil society institutions—what Rhodes terms “democratic business ethics.” With the evolution of neoliberalism, the corporate “persona” has been assumed to have the capacity for ethical self-regulation without state intervention; the promulgation of business ethics is key to such claims to the “responsible” exercise of corporate sovereignty. Yet, Rhodes argues, in this form, business ethics is typically peculiarly “selfish” and dedicated only to the protection and furtherance of sovereign corporate interests. Following Levinas, however, ethics is the antithesis of such self-sovereignty; ethics is always “despite the self” in my openness to the assignation of responsibility for my neighbor. With the capacities of the nation-state weakened in relation to global business interests, Rhodes looks to radical forms of democracy grounded in civil society as the necessary guardian of business ethics; at VW, the presence of the defeat devices was discovered accidentally by a not-for-profit organization seeking to demonstrate the environmentally friendly qualities of diesel motors. Rhodes concludes that
we are at a historical juncture where the power of corporations to act freely and of their own will in the context of the free market is jeopardizing democracy. By implication, it is only through a radical reassertion of democracy as a contestation of the political dominance of corporations that a democratic ethics for business can be realized (103).
The final chapter of Disturbing Business Ethics is used by Rhodes to reflect on our own practice and commitment as writers with an interest in promoting business ethics. The book necessarily has some limitations. It would have been helpful to provide those readers unfamiliar with the work of Levinas, and more used to rational, normative, or descriptive approaches to business ethics, with a gentler, fuller introduction to his distinctive view of “ethics as first philosophy.” Likewise, its antithesis, neoliberalism, must be seen as far more than an ideology that asserts the morality of self-interest. Instead, its assumptions are performed through a wide array of work-related and other practices that can leave us so preoccupied with the defense or promotion of the self that they effectively blunt this capacity for ethical response (Roberts Reference Roberts2021). Nevertheless, this serves only to make Levinas’s optimistic if demanding view of ethics more urgent and relevant; an ethics grounded in my visceral response to another’s vulnerability, which precedes any calculation or thought, is what “the ego had not wished” (Levinas Reference Levinas1991, 144) but which, if followed, opens to the very different path of taking responsibility for my neighbor. Disturbing Business Ethics is an essential and illuminating read that allows us to view the difficult and demanding territory of business ethics anew and recalls us to the responsibility that this entails.
John Roberts (john.roberts@sydney.edu.au) is a professor in the discipline of accounting at the University of Sydney Business School. His interests in ethics, and in particular the work of Levinas, have informed his empirical work on corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, and processes of accounting and accountability.
